Though the mistake sounds preposterous now, the year was 1997, and Carol was one of the very few female head brewers in the country. Today, Stoudt says of The Lancaster Dispensing Co., “They’re still a lovely account of mine but that was funny,” and notes that otherwise she’s very rarely tripped over gender assumptions in the 33 years since she opened Stoudts on her family’s land in rural Adamstown, Pennsylvania, 63 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

Carol Stoudt Announces Her Retirement

Sadly for the millions of fans she’s developed since launching in 1987 as one of the very first female brewmasters since Prohibition, that bar, along with all others across her sales territory, will stop selling Stoudts beers once it runs through any remaining inventory. In February, the 70-year-old announced she would mostly retire from brewing and shut down Stoudts, save the minuscule quantities she’ll continue to make for the Black Angus Restaurant–also located on the property and owned and operated by Ed since 1962.

“I won’t be working 80-to-90 hours a week,” she says.

Stoudt says sales of her traditional German- and English-style beers have slowed in the past few years. And she really wants to start traveling more for pleasure (especially domestically) and spending more time with her five children and their kids.

(More: Why I Love to Cook with Pilsner Beer)

“I really have to take one day at a time. I love to cook, perfect recipes, read. I haven’t had time,” she says, noting that she’s spent a lot of her recent hours giving press interviews.

Queen of Hops

Those interviews would have more than likely included a question or two about her role as the self-titled “Queen of Hops”–one of the original and most famous female leaders in craft beer. To show how increasing numbers of women gradually entered the industry after she did, she credits Oregon malt innovator Teri Fahrendorf for starting the Pink Boots Society in 2007 to empower the working women of beer and observes that she herself was one of the first women to judge the Great American Beer Festival® Competition.

Now, she says, “I think it’s almost 50/50. … I’m glad more women who have passion for beer go into it. It’s nice to have a balance.”

The Best Part of Craft Beer is the People

Looking back at her overall experience in the industry, the former kindergarten teacher says though she does love educating beer lovers on flavors and styles, the best part of her career has been the people.

“I love the passion of the people that make fabulous beers and the people who’ve enjoyed them over the years,” she says. “I really think there was a lot of personal growth for me. I enjoyed being around all ages and applauding the beers they’re making.”

(Related: Female Brewing Pioneers and Innovators Talk Gender Equality in Craft Brewing)

Always active and rarely one to reflect wistfully on the past, Stoudt says she’ll probably pop up at beer events now and again. She’d like to sell her 30-barrel brewing system or rent the space and equipment to another brewer. She’ll hang on to her two-barrel pilot system for the restaurant but doesn’t know yet how much beer she’ll make or which styles, though she suspects she’ll keep brewing certain classics like Golden Lager, Pils, American Pale Ale, Gearshifter IPA and Fat Dog Stout.

“I do love beer and its people. It makes me smile. It keeps me young.” Carol Stoudt

She does know that all of her brewers have already found new jobs and her sales manager is staying on, for now, to help wind things down and maybe take on a new role at the family complex that will continue to house the restaurant, plus the German bier hall, antiques mall and bakery. He could produce beer events or work directly under Stoudt if she decides to eventually contract brew or boost production, just a bit, beyond the restaurant.

She does hint that she’d like to keep supplying beer to McGillin’s Olde Ale House in Philadelphia. It’s her longest-running account and one of the oldest continuously operating bars in America. Not only does the tavern advertise that it sells more Stoudts on draft than any other pub in Pennsylvania, but it also doesn’t hide the fact that the brewery makes its three house beers, McGillin’s Real Ale, McGillin’s Genuine Lager and McGillin’s 1860 IPA.

“I would love to keep serving them,” Stoudt says. “Can you imagine someone being that loyal?”

Not long after Stoudt announced her retirement, Pennsylvania craft old guard Sly Fox Brewing announced the release of a Stoudts collaboration beer called Black Lager packaged in a plain 16-ounce can. Brewed to honor Stoudt’s legacy, the collaboration suggests that one might get chances to drink her beer through similar endeavors with others going forward.

“I mean, I do love beer and its people,” she says. “It makes me smile. It keeps me young.”

The post Craft Brewing Pioneer Carol Stoudt Discusses Retirement After 30-Plus Years appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

No Beer, Big Problem

“When Maria struck the island, we were literally isolated from the rest of the world for a few weeks. That meant that no ships were arriving on the island except for the ones that carried first-necessity supplies. So no beer from outside of PR was available,” says William Norris, who owns San Juan’s Caribbean Brewing, the island’s only homebrew shop and, soon, a brewery of the same name.

“Bars were calling us saying, ‘We don’t have anything!’” says José Carlos Gonzalez, brewmaster at the four-year-old Ocean Lab Brewing, a beach-resort brewery next to the San Juan airport that produces more beer than almost any of Puerto Rico’s approximately one dozen mostly tiny craft breweries.

(Related: Two Brewers, Two Towns, and the Unpredictable Kincade Fire)

To add even more challenges to having a beer in Puerto Rico, the widespread lack of cooling power, generators and gas to fuel them forced a majority of retailers, wholesalers and breweries to dump existing product; plus, the governor imposed a curfew that included an order forbidding alcohol sales for around three weeks.

Necessity Breeds Opportunity for Puerto Rico Craft Breweries

Mercifully, Maria’s clouds, despite their devastation, did leave behind a silver lining or two. Those craft breweries that could save their beer saved existing and new-found clients by filling their draft lines and coolers as soon as these merchants could legally start selling. The infusion sparked sudden recognition, curious appreciation and ongoing acceptance of local Puerto Rico craft beers among grateful drinkers who’d previously had no reason to notice these small breweries.

“That opened up opportunity for people to get to know our brand and ever since, our demand has gone crazy,” says Gonzalez, whose posters and tin tackers now advertise his products at seemingly every site that serves beer.

“We were all trying to survive with what we could,” adds Juan Carlos Rivera Cruz, whose German-style Zurc Brauhaus in Coamo lost power for two months. “Luckily I had enough inventory pre-Maria stocked in the cold room and took advantage of the vacuum/void of empty tap lines around the island. I went back to work very quickly.”

To Dump Beer or Not to Dump

Quickly, maybe. But not easily, and not without a significant amount of stress and anxiety, and probably a decent dose of optimism and faith. When Maria struck, Cruz had just transferred his first Oktoberfest Marzen from the fermenter to the bright tank for maturation, and though he expected to lose the 300-gallon batch to spoilage, he let it age three months just in case.

“By mid-December, ready to dump the batch, I took a sample and it was perfect!” he tells me in an email. “It sold out in January as the only local Marzen that survived the wrath of the hurricane.”

At Ocean Lab, Gonzalez’s team had just installed their first bottling line, which had gotten delayed no thanks to Hurricane Irma two weeks earlier. For their first run, they packaged 400 cases of Ocean Lab’s Blonde Ale and were turning their attention to finishing the fermentation of a harvest ale using the first fresh hops available on the island.

(Related: Houston’s ‘Daisy Chain’ Yeast Experiment Produces Dozens of New Beers)

Though the brewery didn’t sustain any major damage, they could only brew by jerry-rigging processes because of a skeleton crew and the need to temporarily bypass a broken generator by running electric cords from a functioning one at the other side of the resort.

“We were really dire,” Gonzalez says. “We asked ourselves, ‘Do we open and drain the tanks and claim it as a loss or do we continue the fight?’”

Then the chillers that kept the fermenting beer from overheating started having trouble. As a last-ditch effort, Gonzalez threw some coolant into the system. To his surprise, when he came in the next morning, the temperature inside the tanks had dropped back to desired levels.

“That was our Eureka moment,” he says. “I started yelling, ‘We need people! We need people! We’re going to start bottling right now!’”

That year, and every year since, they celebrated the victory and dedicated the harvest ale to the people of Puerto Rico.

“It brought people together. We were a small brewery trying to make it and were in the same boat they were in,” Gonzalez says.

Offering an Oasis to Storm Victims

The bottles couldn’t have come any sooner. According to Zalika Guillory, who co-owns the popular La Taberna Lúpulo beer bar in Old San Juan, only Fok Brewing and Boquerón sold packaged beer up to that point.

Guillory, however, runs a lot of draft beer lines, which she couldn’t use for months. Without enough power to keep keg-storage refrigerators running, she borrowed jockey boxes, the make-shift draft dispensers often seen at festivals and events. But jockey boxes need ice to keep them cold, and that, too, proved extraordinarily difficult to get.

This is why after the no-alcohol order lifted, Guillory, who opened almost immediately after the storm to serve food and offer charging stations to victims, returned a borrowed box to her distributor. Then, Ocean Lab owner Luichi Fernández called to ask if she wanted to borrow a smaller box. She said yes.

(More by this Author: Piney River Brewing Puts Tiny Town on the Map)

“We would plug in our ice machine from time to time and make ice (only for cooling, not for drinking, as water was not safe) and we took it to sell his kegs, which we used for almost two months,” she says. “We went through all the beer we had and as much other beer as we could get our hands on.”

“The first weeks after we opened were great for sales, but we just felt lucky to be able to have a spot for people to relax and hang out,” says Enrique Fernandez, owner of La Esquinita craft beer terrace in Bayamón. “The bar turned into a sort of oasis. Being able to have a cold beer in PR at this point was a luxury so naturally people flocked in to try and shut off all the craziness in their brains at least for a bit and have a little slice of normal again.”

Once the electric company restored Guillory’s power in late November, she ran 15-20 draft lines, about half of which came from Ocean Lab, followed by Zurc’s one pre-Maria survival. She says no other brewery had reopened at that point.

“It took until around March of the following year for local breweries to resume full production and have beer available,” she says.

Hurricane Maria Kick Starts Interest in Puerto Rico Craft Breweries

Once those breweries did reopen, both craft and domestic beer drinkers across the island joyfully welcomed them back.

The owner of REBL Brewery, located in Utuado, a central mountainous village smashed hard by the hurricane, says bar patrons applauded when he delivered his first post-hurricane batch of flagship Kasiri cassava ale. And when the owners of Cabo Rojo’s Pura Vida Brewing ran events shortly after launching their line in January 2018, they continually ran out of beer in two hours or less.

(Find a Local Brewery: Brewery Map)

Enrique Fernandez and Juan Cruz both say social media posts and Untappd check-ins show many of their reluctant post-Maria patrons have stuck around, and Norris says despite closing for five months, his homebrew shop has picked up more customers than ever. He expects four new breweries (including his own) to come online this year, a hopeful sign that drinkers continue to embrace locally made beer in Puerto Rico.

Not long after Maria, Ocean Lab bought a centrifuge and added two 30-barrel fermenters and four 60-barrel fermenters to its opening lineup. In February the brewery put its first cans on the market and by spring it’ll have a new chiller, two new bright tanks and six more 60-barrel fermenters. That’s what’s needed to support a brewery that jumps from 900 barrels of annual production in 2017, to 3,200 in 2018, to a projected 10,000 barrels this year, without even selling to the mainland.

“Our demand continues to increase,” Gonzalez says. “That’s the bittersweet story of Maria.”

The post Hurricane Maria’s Bittersweet Story: Puerto Rico’s Craft Breweries appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

From Mari Kemper, who opened Thomas Kemper Brewing in Seattle with her husband in 1984 and now co-owns Chuckanut Brewery & Kitchen in Bellingham, to Tamil Maldonado Vega, who launched Raices Brewing in Denver five months ago, nine women reflected on topics ranging from the need for gluten-free beer to the surprising number of women working in Mexico and Turkey’s craft brewing industries. That said, much of the session revolved around ways the women make their US-based businesses more inclusive to females and ways they recommend women get ahead in their careers.

“My advice is similar to what I tell men: Put your head down and hand up. You would be amazed at how quickly you can get promoted,” said Leah Cheston of Washington, D.C.’s Right Proper Brewing. “And be out there. Keep doing it. Be an example so that ‘women in beer’ is not a weird thing anymore.”

(Related: Discrimination Lawsuit Targets California Brewery’s Women’s Beer Forum)

“Build relationships with other women,” advises Maldonado Vega. “Be part of the craft beer community and be your best. Keep up with all the evolutions and patterns.”

And Julia Herz, BA Craft Beer Program Director, who moderated the event, added that women who want to get into the craft beer world might first teach themselves how to homebrew.

“Start brewing,” she said. “It gives you professional brewing experience in your own home.”

Speaking via recorded video because she caught a bug that kept her from flying in from Santa Rosa, California, Russian River Brewing co-owner Natalie Cilurzo said she makes herself available as a mentor to women just as she works to set an example for her employees.

“I consider mentoring to be very similar to how I run my company,” she said. “I want my employees to feel they can come to me.”

Karen Hertz of Golden, Colorado’s gluten-free Holidaily Brewing, said in addition to learning everything possible about the craft beer industry, styles, pairings, and more, “Have female leaders (at the brewery) willing to show people the ropes.”

“Look beyond just the industry,” adds Dogfish Head Craft Brewery co-founder Mariah Calagione. “We look to our vendors, our banks, all the people supporting our brewpubs, and make them understand we want them to value this and we’re looking at who they’re sending in.”

And Theresa McCulla, who’s curating the BA-supported Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, takes care to include women in her collection and talk about them whenever possible. She rarely misses an opportunity to mention investors and workers Suzanne Stern Denison and Jane Zimmerman when she speaks about Sonoma, California’s long-shuttered New Albion Brewing as the first ground-up brewery built in America since after Prohibition. Founder Jack McAuliffe usually receives all of the credit for that endeavor.

(More: Brewer Averie Swanson Starts a New Chapter in Chicago)

“Suzy had the van and brewed the beer herself when Jack wasn’t there. Two women funded the first craft brewery,” she told the audience.

And Virginia Morrison, of San Diego’s Second Chance Brewing, tells men that women can’t eradicate discrimination on their own.

“If you’re in a room and someone talks over a woman or takes over an idea, speak up. Speak up. We will be your best friends.”

In the above photo:

Front Row, L to R: Theresa McCulla, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, DC, Mari Kemper, Chuckanut Brewery, Bellingham, WA, Leah Cheston, Right Proper Brewing Company, Washington, DC

Back Row, L to R: Virginia Morrison, Second Chance Beer Company, San Diego, CA, Tamil Maldonado, Raices Brewing Company, Denver, CO, Karen Hertz, Holidaily Brewing Company, Golden, CO, Ting Su, Eagle Rock Brewery, Los Angeles, CA, Mariah Calagione, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Milton, DE, Julia Herz, Brewers Association

The post Female Brewing Pioneers and Innovators Talk Gender Equality in Craft Brewing appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

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“I mentioned my three kids,” she says. “I don’t even get a moment to use the bathroom by myself, let alone study.”

She won the award two days after submitting. It afforded her the time and money to take the Cicerone Beer Savvy prep class, which taught her everything she needed to know to pass her Certified Beer Server exam. This was 2017, four months after joining Lost Rhino Brewing in Northern Virginia as cellarwoman, then cellar manager. Today the woman who had zero brewery experience before this job still runs Lost Rhino’s cellar but also heads up the lab and quality assurance program as well as designs and teaches the brewery’s extensive employee training program, School of Hard Hops.

“As a mom of three kids returning to the workforce is hard. Combine that with a total career change, in a male-dominated field, where you have little experience … let’s just say it was tough,” she writes in a summary of her experience. “I can vividly remember crying on my way home, my boots soaked and body sore, wondering what in the world I had done. Ready to quit, but scared what example that would set for my kids, especially my girls. How can I tell them girls can do anything boys can do, when I can’t even last a week?”

‘Opportunity to Work with Badasses’

Hoffman won the Cicerone scholarship through the Pink Boots Society (PBS), a 12-year-old international non-profit that devotes itself to mentoring women in the beer industry. She’s one of around 100 women to win a Pink Boots scholarship to attend an educational beer and brewing course or relevant programming, like a conference or travel opportunity. All sorts of activities fund the initiatives, including the sale of Pink Boots Collaboration Brew Day beers brewed by women around the world to celebrate International Women’s Day every March 8.

“I just couldn’t have gotten where I am now without this scholarship. It has opened a lot of doors for me and now I have the opportunity to work with badasses like Lisa White!” emails Jordan Boinest, whose Pink Boots scholarship allowed her to attend the Business of Craft Beer Distribution at San Diego State University six months before opening Newgrass Brewing in Shelby, North Carolina. She now works as an inside sales rep at White Labs, a company whose headquarters she first connected with while studying in San Diego.

“Checking out their facility was a top priority while there. (Co-founder) Lisa White is a huge supporter of the Pink Boots Society and has been an inspiration to many women over the years,” writes Boinest, noting that White Labs not only hosts an annual collaboration brew but is now sponsoring Bière de Femme, an all-women’s beer fest in North Carolina Boinest was instrumental in launching three years ago.

“How can I tell them girls can do anything boys can do, when I can’t even last a week?” Melissa Hoffman, Lost Rhino Brewing

Bière de Femme emerged from Boinest’s concern that her home state only had one Pink Boots chapter at the time. In brainstorming ways to attract more women to the group, she and a few colleagues developed the idea for the traveling in-state fest, which has female brewers from around North Carolina brew unique, small-batch beers exclusively for the event. Because all proceeds benefit Pink Boots, the event has raised enough money to send two local women on Pink Boots-hosted trips to visit top female brewers and beer attractions in Germany.

“Seeing women have the opportunity to join together as professionals to raise scholarship funds for other women inspires me on a daily basis. The women here in North Carolina are tight because of this event and I think it has formed long-lasting relationships for us all,” Boinest says.

(LEARN: What is the Independent Craft Brewer Seal?)

Pink Boots Scholarship Recipients Pay it Forward

Some scholarship winners have used the festival as an opportunity to fulfill their “pay it forward” obligation, which requires all PBS scholarship winners to share what they’ve learned in their studies with other Pink Boots members. Because of this emphasis on education, some scholarship recipients make it their personal mission to incorporate teaching into all facets of their careers.

Much as Hoffman’s style and service training taught her a lot of what she needs to know to school her staff on how to provide top-notch customer service in the tasting room, Pink Boots member Emily Slayton has made the dissemination of knowledge a primary focus of Skeleton Key Brewery, located outside of Chicago. Not only did she invite Pink Boots members to her brewery to learn about malt after spending four days on a scholarship to Barley Field School at the Institute of Barley and Malt Sciences at North Dakota State University, she estimates she’s taught about 500 beer lovers the nitty gritty about selecting and working with malting barley through public brew days and in-house brewery classes she and her partner teach on beer styles and homebrewing.

“To be able to tell people about the granular elements of ingredients in a way that’s approachable, you see something click in their eyes and know they’re going to take this and make their own craft better,” she says.

To her students, who comprise other commercial brewers, homebrewers and enthusiasts, Slayton passes on her passion for barley growers, the cultivation of malting barley appropriate for craft beer and the efforts to improve the long-term sustainability of the crop. She’s considering proposing a panel on barley to Illinois’ state-wide Craft Brewers Conference, while in general, her knowledge makes her a much better brewer and a much more responsible corporate citizen.

“Sheesh are we going to be able to make enough barley? It’s not a bottomless pit,” she says, referencing the threat climate change poses to traditional barley growing. “There are things to take into consideration to not overextend our resources.”

(TRAVEL: Plan Your Next Beercation)

‘Teach Yourself What You Don’t Know’

Just days away from opening Tannery Run Brew Works in a Philadelphia suburb, Carly Chelder’s scholarship to study strategic management and marketing while obtaining a Portland State University Online Business of Craft Brewing Certificate should make her a better manager of other critically important brewery resources: people, productivity and personality. As the business partner who focuses on human resources, record keeping and marketing, she’s developing a too-often-overlooked policy handbook to guide the company’s staff and external relations while hiring outside professionals to take over tasks — like branding — that she knows she can’t do professionally enough on her own.

“Teach yourself what you know you don’t know and go ask the experts for advice,” she says.

Thanks to the course, Chelder does know what to expect financially. Many brewery owners only half-jokingly warn industry newcomers to double — if not triple — their budget and timeline for opening. But in her case, she knows what equipment she needs and how she’s going to pay for it, how to read tax tables, and everything that goes into packaging.

Neither Chelder nor her two business partners (her significant other and a friend) had commercial brewing or entrepreneurial experience before deciding to open Tannery Run 3.5 years ago. This made the scholarship and course that much more crucial to their success.

She says, “Earning the scholarship has been a game changer for me. At that point, I didn’t know a lot about the industry other than 10 plus years of personal craft beer culture, not much about the business side of things. But I had the will, and I started to soak things up.”

(VISIT: Find a U.S. Craft Brewery)

Chelder discovered PBS back in those early days and now immerses herself deeply in the Philadelphia chapter — one of 91 in 10 countries. Scholarship recipients typically commit strongly to the group after — and sometimes before — they satisfy their pay it forward obligation.

When Jordan joined Pink Boots, North Carolina had just one chapter, which wasn’t actively holding meetings. Jordan and another woman called one together and 10 women came from around the state. They conceived of the Bière de Femme fest — the first in the world to donate 100 percent of proceeds to Pink Boots — and now five chapters crisscross North Carolina.

Hoffman, who, like Chelder, first learned about Pink Boots by researching educational brewing opportunities online, taught an off-flavor and a sensory course for the local PBS chapter at her brewery. These days, she’s volunteering as both co-leader of the Washington, D.C. chapter and secretary of the District’s brewer’s guild as she studies for her Level 2 Cicerone certification.

Though she says, “I still haven’t found a quiet moment to pee!” she calls her ongoing relationship with Pink Boots “empowering.”

“When someone originally mentioned the Pink Boots Society to me, my outlook and attitude changed. I was once again excited and positive about my new career adventure and know if it weren’t for the Pink Boots Society I would have turned back to a known path rather than the road less traveled.”

The post Pink Boots Scholarships Kick Open Doors for Women in Beer appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

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“When we signed our first distributor he said, ‘I’ve been selling beer in this area for 50 years and I’ve never heard of Bucyrus, Missouri,’” laughs Brian Durham, who established Piney River with his wife, Joleen, in 2010.

Despite its distance from civilization and ensconcement a few hundred miles deep into the Ozark Mountains, Piney River has emerged as an international destination for deeply in-the-know beer lovers, curious wilderness-adventure tourists and foreign officers training at the nearby Fort Leonard Wood military base.

(Find: A US Brewery Near You)

Brian says nothing within 100 miles can compare.

“We’re making award-winning beer pretty much in the middle of a cow pasture,” he says, referencing the cattle the couple, both in their mid-40s, keep on property. “You turn off the hilly, curvy paved road onto the hilly, curvy gravel road and wonder, ‘Where in the world am I being taken?’”

The allure derives from more than the bucolic atmosphere and the fact that their 13-year-old son, Andy, makes and cans an eponymous root beer for sale to kiddies and designated drivers. It even goes beyond the fact that pretty much anyone who knows the Durhams seriously spends multiple minutes gushing about how gosh-darn wholesome, genuine and plain old nice they are.

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To wit, Jacob Halls, who distributes Piney River in Mid-Missouri for N. H. Scheppers Distributing Company, says, “Brian and Joleen are incredibly fun to be around and exude kindness.”

Honestly, though, the real draw here is the beer, award-winning and otherwise. Two years after commercially releasing their first scaled-up homebrew recipe, the Durhams collected a gold medal for Old Tom Porter from the Great American Beer Festival (GABF). The following year they won an equally prestigious World Beer Cup gold medal for Float Trip (wheat blonde) Ale.

“I always tell people it has nothing to do with me; it has to do with us having great water,” Brian says, only partially kidding.

Yes, he pulls from a personal well that taps into the Ozarks’ premium-quality hard water, replete with beer-friendly limestone, calcium and magnesium. But Brian’s serious about his bit of skill and lot of luck.

Will Anyone Want Our Beer?

He and Joleen, who met in college on the East Coast before moving back to Joleen’s hometown 30 miles from Bucyrus to work at her father’s manufacturing plant, started homebrewing around the same time they decided to open Piney River as a way to diversify their business investments during the economic recession of the last decade. They didn’t attend brewing school and they didn’t work for other breweries. Only recently have they hired a head brewer, a local named Matt Beatty who’s brewed for more than two decades at notable Pacific Northwest breweries like Steelhead, Widmer Brothers and Ninkasi.

(MORE: Discover the Lighter, Brighter Side of Coffee Beers)

Before that, Brian oversaw the brewing, and the accounting major with a master’s degree in business taught himself everything he knows.

“It’s crazy,” he says of his ability. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Books and the internet supplied most of Brian’s knowledge, which built on several years of traveling to breweries around the country with Joleen and drinking all the New Belgium Fat Tire, Pete’s Wicked Ale and Sierra Nevada they could buy at their local liquor store. But craft beer was a long way from reaching the mainstream in rural Missouri, and Joleen says, “We really didn’t think anyone would drive two miles down the road to drink beer at a brewery.”

(List: A Beer Geek’s Travel Checklist)

So they settled on two insurance policies: they would focus on distributing their beer around Missouri and Arkansas instead of banking too much on on-site sales and they would start brewing on a tiny 10-gallon Sabco Brew Magic system that cost $4500 – including the price of four converted half-barrel kegs that worked as glorified fermentation tanks.

“We thought, ‘We can fix up the (70-year-old) barn and see if there’s actually an interest,’” Joleen says. “We got to the point where we could come home from work and turn out three brews and go to bed before 1 o’clock in the morning.”

As for attracting interest, they quickly realized, as Joleen says, “We were wrong.”

Piney River Aims to Keep Up with Demand

To keep up with demand, they bought their first canning line in 2011, before any other craft brewery in the state, and in 2014 broke ground on the BARn taproom and invested $1.5 million in a 15-barrel brewhouse, related equipment and a new eight-head canning line. Since then, they’ve purchased two 30-barrel oak foeders for aging beers with wild yeasts and are experimenting in-house with a program that has them capturing and propagating yeast right from the farm air.

(MORE: No Flights Zone: How One Brewery Is Taking a Stand Against Trying Them All)

Until they turn that project into a money-making endeavor, they express the southern Missouri terroir by adding the state’s ubiquitous black walnuts to a wheat ale to make their popular Black Walnut Wheat. They also name their beers and choose label illustrations that reflect where they live.

As Brian says, “The Ozarks are a great place to use to start naming beers, using local ingredients and reminding people of a place they like to visit on vacation.”

The post Piney River Brewing Puts Tiny Town on the Map appeared first on CraftBeer.com.